Dragons! also, Vince Gilligan seems to be a Beatles fan

[selenak]

Shezan and Maia, thank you so much for the adorable dragons!

(Once The Hobbit hits the big screen, I predict a great uprise in dragon popularity again. Not that they're ever entirely out of fashion, but, you know...)

I'm still marathoning Breaking Bad and well into the third season now, when up comes this little scene:

Jesse: has been beaten up again; this is not a spoiler, because when one two main characters gets beaten up on this show, it's always Jesse. Reboot!Kirk has nothing on him in this regard.

Walt: awkwardly enters room for plotty reasons. Can't think of anything to say.

Saul (drug dealer lawyer extraordinaire, trying to break awkwardness, to Walt): Well, you're the cute one now. Paul, meet Ringo. Ringo, meet Paul.

Guys, I liked the show already, you didn't have to bribe me with this!

Btw, I can see Jesse as Ringo, especially a Ringo who instead of using his musical talent to drum runs around with the gangs and the drinks that fatal bit too long. But any attempt to cast Walter White as Paul is met with swift and abject failure. Then again, Paul did think of becoming a teacher as a kid before the music got him for good...

Comments

[kalypso]

Just dropping off another dragon.

As I said to a friend when the casting was announced, "Do you think there's been much Bilbo/Smaug before?"

[selenak]

Ha. Also, v. true.

[skywaterblue]

I'm hoping the Pern film finally gets made.

[selenak]

Would you believe I never read a single Pern novel? When I was the right age, it was all MZB for me.

[skywaterblue]

McCaffrey rightly deserves a place among the Greats, if only because to deny her because of the discussion 'they weren't that good' feels like sexism when we have the same damn discussion about Asimov and Heinlein.

(Also, I get the feeling that a good conversation about this would have to be someone who's actually read her other work. I've only read the Pern novels, and it's quite clear she stopped caring at a certain point and they became the rent check so she could do other things.)

I've only ever read 'Mists of Avalon' of MZB, and that because of the TV film. (Which I think is underrated.)

[selenak]

I read The Mists of Avalon when I was 13, which turned out to be perfect. It was my discovery of feminism, so to speak, of positive presentation of non-straight sexuality, and of the fact you can tell myths in different ways (previously the only Arthurian stories I was familiar with were Hal Forster's Prince Valiant cartoons and some films). I think if I had read it ten or twenty years later, I might have responded quite differently, been annoyed by the simple reverse of black and white when it came to christianity vs paganism, but at 13 it was the thunderbolt from the sky. Then I devoured the Darkover novels (such as were available in German at the time, some of her other sci fi novels and the Catch Trap. By the time I was 17, I had worked up the courage for a fan letter, for which I got a very nice reply. And then in my 20s I started to lose interest, and I think that must have been when she stopped writing the novels and they were co-written or written by her secretary anyway. But she was definitely one of the defining writers of my teenage years.

[skywaterblue]

That ghostwriter thing seems to get to them all in the end.